One afternoon in the summer of 1995, a curious incident occurred. I was fine-tuning my spoken commentary on a CD I was preparing about music and the brain. To detect glitches in the recording, I was looping phrases so that I could hear them over and over. At one point, when I was alone in the room, I put one of the phrases, “sometimes behave so strangely,” on a loop, began working on something else and forgot about it. Suddenly it seemed to me that a strange woman was singing! After glancing around and finding nobody there, I realized that I was hearing my own voice repetitively producing this phrase—but now, instead of hearing speech, I perceived a melody spilling out of the loudspeaker. My speech had morphed into song by the simple process of repetition.

This striking perceptual transformation, which I later found occurs for most people, shows that the boundary between speech and song can be very fragile. Composers have taken account of the strong connections between music and speech, for example, incorporating spoken words and phrases into their compositions. In addition, numerous vocalizations seem to fall near the boundary between speech and song, including religious chants and incantations, oratory, opera recitative (a style of delivery in opera resembling sung ordinary speech), the cries of street vendors and some rap music.

This article was originally published with the title Speaking in Tones.

3 Comments

1. 1. Autimum 04:02 AM 8/5/10

   This might be why Music Therapy and singing phrases to children with speech delay and other problems is helpful?

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2. 2. cdevries 07:43 AM 9/7/10

   I am trying to download only the article "Speaking in Tones: Music and Language Partners in the Brain" in your July 2010 issue. I teach in an american school in Cairo, Egypt where most of our students are Egyptian learning English as second language. The school has cut the music program in half and I am trying to get it reinstated to twice a week. Your article would be very helpful in substantiating the importance of music for second language students. What would be the cost for only this article as I will have to pay for it?
   
   I look forward to hearing from you.
   
   Carol de Vries

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3. 3. verdai 07:14 PM 9/12/10

   well, duuu uh.
   now we speak in barks, later we will speak in music.
   
   (no one mentioned exactly what part of the brain has the most music comprehension- that would be without words.

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